The body regulating Florida public schools and state colleges Wednesday approved what the Florida Department of Education calls “one of the most comprehensive, parent-centered AI frameworks in the country.”

The State Board of Education  require public school districts and charter school governing boards to amend their internet safety policies to include specific guardrails and directives related to AI by July 1. 

“We are neither going to one extreme, i.e. banning AI, nor are we going to the other extreme, which is just unfettered access,” Education Commissioner Henry Mack said during the board’s meeting in Winter Haven.

Districts and charter schools, at a minimum, must make policies to “protect students, parents, and instructional personnel from unlawful, deceptive, unsafe, or unauthorized uses of artificial intelligence systems, services, applications, and tools used in connection with educational programs and operations in Florida public schools,” according to the public school rule. 

The idea, the rule states, is to “ensure that any approved use of artificial intelligence protects education records and student information, while supporting student achievement, civic literacy, academic excellence, and workforce preparedness.”

More specifically, schools will have to notify parents when teachers approve an AI instructional tool for use, including the name of the platform and classes in which it would be used and the nature of student interaction.

The policy must include a process for parents to object to AI use and provide alternatives to the tool.

“Florida will not outsource childhood to a chatbot,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a news release following the meeting. “We welcome tools that help teachers teach and students learn. We will not accept tools that hide from parents, harvest student data, grade kids in secret, or pretend to be a friend. In this state, a teacher stands in front of the class, a parent has the last word, and a student still has to think.”

Schools will be required to conduct additional reviews for AI tools used in PreK-5 to ensure they are age-appropriate. 

The rule looks to protect the teaching profession from being replaced by computers. It calls to “ensure that the use of AI instructional tools is limited to supplementing, and not replacing, the professional judgment of teachers and the primary right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children.”

Further, the policy must ensure AI is “accurate, transparent, viewpoint neutral, accessible to students and educators with disabilities.”

State colleges

The board approved a similar for the state college system, directing the 28 boards of trustees to create policies “that provide for the use and limitations of use of artificial intelligence tools in order to ensure quality of education for students, efficiency of operations, and a safe learning environment for the whole college community.”

“The rule that you accepted is not a prohibition, it empowers faculty to decide what to do, it allows the instructor to explicitly permit it or prohibit it with respect to their assignments,” Mack said of the college-level policy.

“I just think it’s a great thing that we put the guardrails, but the guardrails are so nuanced that it allows for flexibility and innovation and faculty ownership in a way that does not compromise or usurp the faculty’s ability to teach what they want.”

This story was originally published by Florida Phoenix.

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cites content, competencies, ways of thinking, and motivators as the cornerstones to numeracy. The findings build upon hundreds of earlier studies and will help kids enter middle school with a strong math foundation, CEO Arun Ramanathan said. 

And there is considerable consensus to the approach, he said.  

“The framework offers long-needed alignment: not how to teach, but what must be developed and how the pieces fit,” Ramanathan said in an email. 

According to its report, released Feb. 4, content is centered on the core mathematical ideas all future learning is based on while competencies refers to the skills students need to use math meaningfully. 

Ways of thinking encompasses the cognitive processes that support reasoning and problem-solving while motivators signal the beliefs and mindsets that foster engagement and persistence.

“If you asked teachers what they think numeracy is, you will get a lot of different answers,” said Gloria Lee, lead author of the report. “There is not a clear framework or scaffolding for people to communicate all of these parts. So, we are trying to fill that void.” 

The organization acknowledges the ongoing math wars, which pit explicit instruction, procedural fluency, guided practice and repetition against inquiry-based learning and conceptual understanding. It calls the dispute an unnecessary distraction. 

PowerMyLearning, which hopes their paper becomes a guide for educators and policymakers, said each of these pillars breaks down into four different categories. 

The four areas of content, for example, are integers, fractions, shapes and data while the four competencies are conceptual understanding, fact fluency, procedural fluency and application. The four ways of thinking are symbolic understanding, pattern recognition, explaining and sense-making while the motivators include math identity and persistence.

“Teachers, administrators and families must make intentional efforts to communicate that math is for everyone and everyone belongs in math,” the paper notes. “This requires explicitly promoting inclusive messages and countering negative ones, creating inclusive classroom environments, and establishing policies for support and acceleration rather than exclusivity.”

Jo Boaler, a mathematics education professor at Stanford University who co-authored California’s new math framework, reviewed PowerMyLearning’s paper and provided research for it. 

“I appreciate that the report gives a balanced perspective on number sense, highlighting the importance of reasoning, problem solving and mindset, as well as procedures,” she said. “Hopefully it helps to bridge the divides in mathematics education.”

was established in 1999 under another name and focused on technology in the classroom, including giving free hardware and software to schools in need. It later shifted to the “triangle of learning relationships” among students, teachers and families before zeroing in on early math. Though the organization aims to improve education for all, it has a focus on multilingual learners and children from historically underserved communities.

CEO Ramanathan told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ in an interview last week that despite ongoing disputes about how math should be taught, there is actually an enormous amount of agreement around what students need to succeed. 

“When you look at the areas folks are disagreeing about — conceptual understanding, fact fluency and procedural fluency — we put them all in one area, as competencies,” he said. 

Students, he said, can’t spend all of their time repeating certain skills. 

“They also have to be able to dig deeply into the reasons why certain elements of mathematics result in a correct answer,” he said. “For folks to be focusing on one element of that versus all of them together, when you see them all in one place, you don’t see them as (being) in conflict but in alignment.” 

There is no need to favor one element of learning over another, the report notes.

“In fact, the evidence is clear that fluency with facts and procedures helps students with conceptual understanding and vice versa. Numeracy requires fluency with facts and procedures as well as conceptual understanding and the ability to apply these mathematical capabilities to situations in the real world.”

The group says its findings further the and integrate more than 200 studies across math learning science, developmental psychology, and mathematics education.

Disclosure: The Gates Foundation and the Joseph Drown Foundation provide financial support to PowerMyLearning and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.